hlma-1

Please explain, in a well-constructed paragraph, using solid arguments and no personal attacks, (a) how Obama is responsible for the state of the global economy, and (b) what he could do or could have done to make it healthy.

Oh, no, they can't be happy. Canada has universal mandatory health insurance. They must be chafing at the bit, hoping to escape the jackboot of Big Government by moving here where there is a tiny shred of hope that people may again be thrown off the plan for a preexisting condition and finally breathe the fresh air of freedom. If those Canadians have told you they're happy, they may be brainwashed zombies - or may be watching their backs in case the Commissar is within hearing range.

Romney's 10 years of tax returns may contain nothing technically illegal, but I suspect that they will turn out to be Exhibit A of the kind of evidence that prominent economists cite as to why we have such a disparity of wealth in this country now, one that grows bigger the more we apply GOP economic guidelines - and one that is partly responsible for why the recovery can't get off the ground faster. The figures are out there, and most of us know them by now: the top one percent has tripled its share of national wealth in the past 30 years, etc. while the economic pie has hardly grown. If we discover that Romney has not paid taxes at all in some years, or has paid a much smaller rate than Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, then it's nothing but a shoo-in for Obama's plan to eliminate the top Bush tax cuts. After all, Romney will want not only to extend them but to increase the share going to the "top earners" (sometimes inaccurately called "job creators"), and the tax returns are likely to wreck his credibility there. I find the whole thing hilarious, and it just goes to show why people grasped at Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain, Santorum and Perry last year before finally having to settle for the poster boy for the 1%.

It is in everyone's long-term interest, whether Dem, Rep, or independent, for everyone to vote. Whatever short-term gain one party might get from preventing even a few people from exercising their right to vote is going to come back at them in the form of years of cynicism and lack of faith in the political process. That feeling is bad enough now that we may need mandatory voting like Belgium - leave your ballot blank if you wish, but show up at the voting booth and sign in. The blank ballot option should help appease those who think that having to show up at all is some kind of infringement on their precious freedom. There is a terrible lack of civic spirit these days. President Eisenhower is weeping in the grave.

This from boston.com: "The [Obama] administration said the waiver program is a response to concerns from state officials — Republicans as well as Democrats — that the work requirements in the law are too rigid and create bureaucratic hurdles to actually placing welfare recipients in jobs. Officials say the program does not violate the underlying law because of a provision that allows waivers of state plans." The governors of Nevada and Utah, both Republicans, have taken an interest in these welfare-to-work waivers. Notice that Kevin O'Brien neglects to mention the source. Sounds a bit like Obamacare, a Republican idea which suddenly and mysteriously becamse poisonous as soon as Obama picked up on it.

The DISCLOSE proposal "may have an ungainly name", but it's not nearly as ugly as GAWD - Government by Anonymous Wealthy Donor. It is bad enough that one of the supplicants who has made himself known, Sheldon Adelson, has put a sizable down payment on Romney's Middle Eastern policy. What about those multi-million donors who have not made themselves known? What do they want? We don't know, and we'll never know under the current system. I defy anyone to stand in front of an audience and claim that this is "just what the Founding Fathers had in mind for our nation".

BTW, I now expect to hear from posters who object that their precious "freedom" to choose not to show up at the polls is going to be trampled upon. Maybe we'd need some kind of "conscientious objector" form for people like that - unless filling out and mailing in that form also impedes their freedom.

In Belgium, everyone must vote - it's the law. Or at least it was when I lived over there. That way, neither side can say the other side was excluding them. It would be an idea worth testing here now, when the nation is in such a partisan mess. Everyone must show up at the polls or face a fine. If you don't want to mark your ballot, that is your business, but you can't deny you haven't had the chance to do so. I don't necessarily agree with all the arguments for extending the voting hours, but this nation does not need more cases of one side being sore and suspicious after an election has passed. It has happened where Dems have lost (Florida, Ohio) and where Republicans have lost (Washington, Minnesota) in the past 12 years, for this and other reasons. Both sides should have an interest in solving the problem. If it takes a longer set of hours to satisfy one side, let it be - at least they will not have any reason to gripe when their side loses.

Here we go, once again, with partisan bickering masquerading as something else. This nation is moving in a direction where eventually, we are going to have to bring in arbitrators from Tibetan Buddhist monasteries to rule on what is or is not right and fair. It would not be a bad idea, actually.

The oil from the Keystone pipeline will not be "our" oil. It will belong to the oil companies, will flow to the Gulf and be sold at market prices and shipped out of there. It will produce a bump of temporary jobs and only a handful of permanant ones. The fact that it's in North America is not relevant - it may as well be in Siberia. It is not estimated to lower prices much at all, and the external costs may outweigh the benefits. The Keystone issue in Romney's incessant TV ads is mostly a red herring. He needs to come up with something more substantial.

I haven't smoked for a long time, but I am sympathetic to the complaints about legislators ganging up on smokers time and again. The important fact is that they are an embattled minority, and they have a hard time defending themselves. In other countries, the population challenges itself to tax bigger "sins" such as the overconsumption of petroleum. If we did that, the connection between taxed product and tax use would be transparent, and the bill could pave every highway in the state. But no, that would mean too many sinners - so let's gang up on the smokers first, then the drinkers, to make sure you get those votes next time around.

You can bet that Rush Limbaugh would NEVER rise to the challenge of stepping off his radio program, entering a neutral space, and debating a climate scientist one-on-one for one hour with no means to hang up on his opponent. He is far too chicken to talk on a level playing field. The same goes for most of the talking heads - they are effective precisely because they don't have to deal directly with opponents and counterarguments.

Maybe Ohio could convince the Koch brothers to donate some spare cash from their Bush tax breaks to spring for a new bridge. After all, it's going to carry many of the cars that use gas that they profit from - it might be a sound investment for them. The higher capital gains tax that they would be paying in a sane system of taxation like we used to have could probably enable them to gold-plate the bridge.

Mayor Bloomberg is no more dictatorial than Mayor Giuliani was, or than Daley in Chicago was - and he's generally well-liked and re-electable. Ayn Rand-style freedom sounds great, but we are talking about costs that are borne not only by the individuals getting obese, but by the entire city in the form of healthcare costs. Think of it this way. By working to prevent the need for ER admissions for hard-core uninsured diabetics that cost taxpayer dollars, Bloomberg is actually working to minimize "socialized medicine". Bloomberg is the kind of responsible Republican that has disappeared from American politics.

I'm with you, Zongo. I drove across PA today, and there were plenty of private businesses at most of the exits, while the rest stops benefit from being just that - places for peace and quiet. They could be better than what they are, but would vendors at privately-run rest stops see any value in reserving space for real rest, rather than just maximizing sales per square yard? To me, rest stops are the highway equivalent of public parks - or do we sell off those, too?

Carthax, it is probably true that a great many birthers are not so much racists but just the same type of chronically suspicious people who thought FDR was a closet member of the "International banker-Communist-Jew conspiracy" during the 1930s, or those who thought the Irish immigrants were the Pope's advance guard in the 19th century. But as a white guy who has occasion to meet both pro- and anti-Obama people in everyday life, I have witnessed multiple instances of the N-word being used among the anti- people to refer to the President. I heard it from a taxi driver just last week, in fact. What do you call that, if not racism?

This is life for a city K-12 teacher, judging from those I know who do it day after day. There have always been people who treat the teaching profession with contempt (thirty years ago I heard an Amway rep say, "Teachers are parasites who don't PRODUCE anything!"), but all the K-12 bashers today ought to be challenged to observe a week's worth of classes in the city and then come back and talk about why kids there don't do as well as suburban kids.

Excellent article, Mark Naymik. If the PD wants to follow it up, it would be a wonderful idea to find an articulate teacher and publish an hour-by-hour log of a teacher's typical week in the city system, with one segment appearing each day, and then comparing that with a log of a teacher's typical week in Solon or Chagrin Falls. So many people say off the cuff that "teachers don't teach" in the city and thereby cause poor scores. For those who have taught, the talk from outside is like hearing armchair hobbyists trying to dictate rocket science to NASA.

People make a legitimate point about where to draw the line on multi-tasking an a car. First, for the record: if smoking, eating, or conversation with passengers were truly dangerous accompaniments to driving, the danger would have been exposed generations ago. Second, the problem of cell phone use and texting while driving is not about the use of hands. People can generally drive with one hand or one arm; that is NOT the problem. The problem is split attention, which would exist even if we had three or four hands. When you are in a car with passengers, you share the same physical context, and consequently the same mental context. When you are on the phone, whether in a car or in the safety of your living room, your attention is focused on interaction with someone who is unaware of your physical context, just as you are unaware of theirs. This is why people's eyes tend to miss things happening around them when they're having a phone conversation, in the living room or anywhere else. Pedestrians in NYC who text or use cells while walking often meander all over the sidewalk in a way that would otherwise be considered wacko. They bump into people, they fail to make way for people walking faster behind them, they stop dead in their tracks on the subway stairs with exiting passengers walking right behind them. Their level of awareness of their surroundings is half what it normally is. Yes, I am sure that some people manage this split attention much better than others do. For that matter, some people manage six martinis better than others and could probably drive safely with a blood alcohol level way over the limit. So should we fine-tune drunk driving laws to accommodate those people? I don't think that anyone would seriously consider that. Evidently it's going to have to take a massive traffic accident in Ohio like the one in California, with multiple deaths, before holdout legislators and citizens wake up and agree that texting and cell use while driving is on the whole just as dangerous as DWI and should be outlawed. As a poster said earlier, we lived until 25 or 30 years ago just fine without these toxic devices, and we can live just fine without them now. As alero56 suggests, a scrambling device may end up being the best solution to an activity that is very hard for police to monitor.

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